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storage of video files
I bought CS4 production premium and being less than enchanted with the capture section, I went back to imovie (having not bought FCP yet) to capture, but I’m noticing that imovie .mov captures are much larger than Premiere’s MPEG2, though the quality of both seems roughly equal. When I used no compression in an old version of FCP, that seemed to be standard, but in iMovie, it goes into a long cruching period, as if that is not native. H.264 is the great output format, but people dont store that for future editing, right?
My question is what standard are people using to store their HD video files, after you chop them down into clips? The Apple intermediate codec seems to have its supporters, and it seems to be what iMovie captures.
That said, Premiere’s MPEG2, as I said, uses about one fourth the amount of space, so it has that advantage, although then I have to use Premiere, which with updates, I hope will get better.
Anyone’s thoughts on this topic will be greatly appreciated. I cant seem to find a definitive answer, and I dont want to cut a bunch of clips just to find there’s something wrong with them long term, Man, HDV is a monster, but MUCH better looking…
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5 Replies
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FCP/Imovie will digitize files, making a new intermediate file in the process, now Prores, that’s not what I would use for storage.
Premiere, on the other hand, allows native editing usually using the original files. Both processes have there pros and cons. But in the end, in Premiere you can simply use the Project manager to copy all the original files, or even to trim it to the edit parts only, either way, those are the original files, and I would leave them as is.
For storage, the most efficient, price and long term solution, once you absorbed the initial drive cost, is LTO tape.
After that come hard drives, and the format we use for files we didn’t have on tape is Quicktime Animation at 100%. I think it is a good format since it is lossless and can be handed out to a mac or pc user for edit.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
I can only tell you what I do and I only capture with premiere pro (I love the size and quality of the mpeg 2’s). If the project is relativly small as many of mine are like 30 second commercial spots, I store all the captured Mpeg2 clips on a couple of dvd’s.
But if it’s a big project, say a short film or docu, I go buy an external hard drive that will fit the whole project clips and all on it and store it on that. With the price of hard drives being so cheap nowadays I beleive it’s what most people do with larger projects.
Of course many people are recording right to hardrives nowadays too and I imagin we all will be too in another 7 to 10 years.
Hope this helps.
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thanks for the input… I guess its a tossup between the two until
A. Apple’s standard import puts out smaller files.
B. Premiere for mac offers on-screen capture preview in HDV, scene auto-detect and faster cropping and saving out, because for me, iMovie/FCP have it beat.
Is MPEG-2 really lossless? It seems counterintuitve that it can be original quality and so much smaller. If so, why doesnt mac use it?
(rhetorical question)I’ll check the animation 100%, but every codec I’ve tried in Apple besides the intermediate codec takes crunching time.
Anyway, thanks
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A. Apple’s standard import puts out smaller files.
wont’ happen. Apple needs to edit in Quicktime MOV files only. It converts everything that isn’t and that takes file size.B. Premiere for mac offers on-screen capture preview in HDV, scene auto-detect and faster cropping and saving out, because for me, iMovie/FCP have it beat.
This has been a point of difference for several versions and personally should have been addressed earlier. I have learned that Adobe weren’t given access to the part of OSX that can do the auto-detect properly in PPro. PC can do it, still no screen preview.Is MPEG-2 really lossless? It seems counterintuitve that it can be original quality and so much smaller. If so, why doesnt mac use it?
MPEG-2 is not lossless, but ingesting the MPEG-2 code from the tape to the same MPEG-2 code on the computer file is not losing any information and it will always be a smaller files size than FCP will give you.– JB
Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net -
great answers…I knew there had to be reasons beyond the obvious for some of these differences.
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